Salt Lake evening Democrat. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1885-1887, 1887-05-20

only one of great number of cases. So
does the Secretary of the Interior. So
does the Commissioner of the General
Land Office. And so, better than all,
does Cleveland, the indomitable, him
self.
Since 1851, and up to the election of
Cleveland, the administration of the
Public Land Office OF the Government
had been simply infamous. Settlers
we're excluded from vast bodies OF public
land, such land being held for the use
and benefit of subsidized corporations.
The public domain, instead OF being
looked upon as a sacred reserve fund,
only to be drawn against in the name OF
honest homesteading, was lavished upon
companies of spectators, as bribes for
building railroads III advance of any de-
mand for them. 1t is even yet scarcely
possible TO recognize to its fullest extent
the criminal idiocy of such waste and
pillage, much less to foresee all the fruits
the country is just now beginning to reap
from such an evil.
AS insane, however, as was the policy
OF granting vast empires of public terri
tory to speculative railroad projects, it
was more criminally insane still to at
tempt to lock up for their future accom-
mediation and aggrandizement other vast
empires under the name OF Indemnity
lands"
1t is these lands which the President is
| after. 1t was on these lands that Gull
ford Miller pre-empted a homestead.
The original land grants themselves
were made under the forms of law; the
indemnity grants without even a shadow
or pretense of q form OF law. There
never has been any law requiring or jus
| tifying the exclusion Of settlers fiom
| public lands OF any sort outside of the
limits of the railway grants. Every
order for such exclusion was made with
out law, at the instance OF the land
grabbing corporations and by untrust-
worthy administrators of the Interior De-
partment acting in the service of those
corporations.
Within the past fifteen years more than
one hundred million acres, beyond the
limit of any land grant, have been closed
against the honest land seeker to serve
the views of the corporate land grabber
| One hundred millions Just stop long
enough to think what an immense terri
tory this is. Its equivalent in square
miles is 500, an actual area of ground
as large as California, or as the six New
England States of Maine, New Hamp-
shire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massa-
chusetts and Connecticut, together with
the three States of New York, New Jer-
sey and Pennsylvania in addition.
| From this enormous extent of public
territory, wholly outside of any railway
land grant, or any pretense whatever OF
any railway land grant, the people have
been excluded by their own servants,
and without the least direction or author
ity of law. Only those who are able to
realize the slgnifcation of those tremen-
dous facts can grasp the full import Of
the Presidents letter of instruction to the
Minister of the Interior.
As Commissioner Sparks truly declares,
| Guilford Miller's case was only one
among many that have proven the in
iquity of this land robbing system.
Thousands of other men equally as de-
serving have been placed by it in the
same situation. In a single county in
the Columbia river territory there are no
less than twelve hundred citizens whose
homesteads the Northern Pacific land
pirates are trying to steal or confiscate.
| Not q settler on land worth occupying
within twenty-five leagues of subsi-
died railway has been free from this
menace. In the majority of cases.
settlers who have acquired indisputable
rights in law to the land they occupied
have been forced either to buy their
homes of the railway company, on lands
to which that company had not, and per-
haps never would have, the least color oi
title, or to suffer eviction by the mandate
of the national land Office at the instance
of that subsidized corporation.
Moreover, the manner of withdrawing
these immense bodies of indemnity lands
was as imperially autocratic as the ukase
OF Car. A simple blue pencil line
drawn on map by railroad attorney
was all that was necessary. Ii a settler
should happen to locate anywhere within
the limits of this prescribed territory, he
was put upon in every imaginable way,
worried, annoyed, threatened, and so
continuously bedeviled and so put into hot
water that he fed finally from his pre-
emption in mortal fear If afterward,
however, the location OF the railway was
changed, new blue pencil line, drawn
by the ubiquitous attorney, marked the
JOuhAdl IIiic Vi IL ltW lUu6IDUllf DSiC,
bnt did not erase the previous one, nor
the previous order of the subsidized thief
who was acting for the subsidized interior
department.
Thus, more than three-fourths OF Ore
gon and Washington Territory have been
in state of reservation caused by the
filing OF different railway maps, not one
Of which was ever adopted as final To-
cation Of the road. And yet for these
Withdrawals of indemnity belts, amount
ing in Dakota alone to more than ,l15,-
600 acres, there never has been the pas
sage OF one single statutory law whatever.
Hence the mighty import of the Cleve-
land letter, and hence the wonderful
force with which it is now appealing to
the hearts of the laboring classes all over
the country. The President has declared
in words that cannot be explained away
nor misunderstood that the indemnity
lands are open to actual settlers; that not
one acre Of them is owned by any rail-
way corporation, and that whoever set
ties upon them in good faith shall be pro-
tected in his rights by the whole power,
if need be, Of the United States. Is it
any wonder, therefore, that dry bones
are shaking.-KanSas City Times.
Rogers & Wfspnmh